An Ontology-centered Approach for Designing an Interactive Competence Management System for IT Companies

The paper presents a generic framework for an intelligent information system of competence management based on ontologies for information technology companies. In a first step it will be applied in an information technology (IT) small enterprise and then its applicability will be verified for other organizations of the same type. The work presented in the paper is performed under the project "CONTO – Ontology-based Competencies Management in Information Technology" funded by the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research, involving two universities, a research institute and an IT private company. A competence management system (CMS), in our vision has to achieve three functions: (a) to support the complete and systematic acquisition of knowledge about the competence of the members of an enterprise; (b) to provide the knowledge about competences and their owners; (c) to apply the available knowledge to serve a purpose. The core of the competence management information system is an ontology that plays the role of the declarative knowledge repository containing the basic concepts (such as: company-job, competence, domain, group, person etc.) and their relationships with other concepts, instances and properties. The Protégé environment was used for the development of this ontology. The structure of the ontology is conceived so that description logics can be used to represent the concept definitions of the application domain in a structured and formally well-understood way. Knowledge acquisition is performed in our approach by enriching the ontology, according to the requirements of the IT company. An advantage of using an ontology-based system is the possibility of the identification of new relations among concepts based on inferences starting from the existing knowledge. The user can choose to query instances of one type of concept. The paper also presents some use-cases

Enterprise application reuse: Semantic discovery of business grid services

Web services have emerged as a prominent paradigm for the development of distributed software systems as they provide the potential for software to be modularized in a way that functionality can be described, discovered and deployed in a platform independent manner over a network (e.g., intranets, extranets and the Internet). This paper examines an extension of this paradigm to encompass ‘Grid Services’, which enables software capabilities to be recast with an operational focus and support a heterogeneous mix of business software and data, termed a Business Grid - "the grid of semantic services". The current industrial representation of services is predominantly syntactic however, lacking the fundamental semantic underpinnings required to fulfill the goals of any semantically-oriented Grid. Consequently, the use of semantic technology in support of business software heterogeneity is investigated as a likely tool to support a diverse and distributed software inventory and user. Service discovery architecture is therefore developed that is (a) distributed in form, (2) supports distributed service knowledge and (3) automatically extends service knowledge (as greater descriptive precision is inferred from the operating application system). This discovery engine is used to execute several real-word scenarios in order to develop and test a framework for engineering such grid service knowledge. The examples presented comprise software components taken from a group of Investment Banking systems. Resulting from the research is a framework for engineering servic

Knowledge Management for Public Administrations: Technical Realizations of an Enterprise Attention Management System

The improvement of governments’ efficiency has gained great importance and validity especially in the current times of economic downturn. E-Government constitutes the most contemporary techno-managerial proposition in the track of possible interventions. The paper addresses, more specifically, empowerments necessitated by Public Administration (PA) organizations. Anchored on the needs of three real-life cases, the paper describes the conception and the realization of an IT artefact together with its methodological appeals aiming at improving information access and delivery and thus PAs’ decision making capacity. Our proposition constitutes a novel approach for managing users’ attention in knowledge intensive organizations which goes beyond informing a user about changes in relevant information towards proactively supporting the user to react on changes. The approach is based on an expressive attention model, which is realized by combining ECA (Event-Condition-Action) rules with ontologies. The technical realizations described in the paper constitute the underlying infrastructure of an Enterprise Attention Management System

Overview of methodologies for building ontologies

A few research groups are now proposing a series of steps and methodologies for developing ontologies. However, mainly due to the fact that Ontological Engineering is still a relatively immature discipline, each work group employs its own methodology. Our goal is to present the most representative methodologies used in ontology development and to perform an analysis of such methodologies against the same framework of reference. So, the goal of this paper is not to provide new insights about methodologies, but to put it all in one place and help people to select which methodology to use

Ontology engineering for simulation component reuse

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) simulation packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry, although they have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. Reuse across organizations is restricted by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of web services. The current representations of web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging semantic web. Semantic models, in the form of ontology, utilized by web service discovery and deployment architectures provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through the use of simulation component ontologies to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The paper presents the development of an ontology, connector software and web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, adopting a less intrusive interface between participants. Although specific to CSPs the work has wider implications for the simulation community

Ontology-based patterns for the integration of business processes and enterprise application architectures

Increasingly, enterprises are using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as an approach to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). SOA has the potential to bridge the gap between business and technology and to improve the reuse of existing applications and the interoperability with new ones. In addition to service architecture descriptions, architecture abstractions like patterns and styles capture design knowledge and allow the reuse of successfully applied designs, thus improving the quality of software. Knowledge gained from integration projects can be captured to build a repository of semantically enriched, experience-based solutions. Business patterns identify the interaction and structure between users, business processes, and data. Specific integration and composition patterns at a more technical level address enterprise application integration and capture reliable architecture solutions. We use an ontology-based approach to capture architecture and process patterns. Ontology techniques for pattern definition, extension and composition are developed and their applicability in business process-driven application integration is demonstrated